What's more, testosterone plays other important roles in health and disease that may surprise you. Risks of unwarranted testosterone testing or treatment include masking of underlying conditions, and unnecessary exposure to side-effects." "It’s not hard to get testosterone on the black market or on the internet or in gyms, so many who want to try it may not seek out medical advice necessarily. Two hypothesized gender → testosterone pathways (our results supported the bolded pathway). Like humans, male cichlid fish who watch each other fight show increased testosterone (17). Testosterone responds to social phenomena that are evolutionarily salient, but not all social phenomena have been evolutionarily selected to modulate testosterone or do so in the same ways. A gender→testosterone pathway would involve multiple inputs including neurobiological, sociocultural, and evolutionary factors. Although testosterone exists and functions similarly in women and men, men have markedly higher average testosterone than women. In addition, there are profound social influences on testosterone that are sometimes more clear than the more widely studied effects of hormones on behavior (7–9). However, healthy men often have lower levels with no symptoms and supplementing testosterone may do more harm than good. Hormone therapy is recommended for those with a condition called hypogonadism, where the body can’t make enough testosterone, resulting in symptoms such as erectile dysfunction, muscle loss and fatigue. For men, testosterone levels naturally decline by about 1% a year after age 30. To test gender→testosterone pathways in men and women, we assessed participants’ testosterone before and after wielding power. In H2, we test whether wielding power in stereotypically masculine, but not feminine, ways would increase testosterone. In the stereotyped performance pathway (H2), we hypothesize that wielding power in gender-stereotyped ways modulates testosterone. In the stereotyped behavior pathway (H1), we hypothesize that wielding power increases testosterone. However, the difference between feminine and masculine stereotypes disappeared when controlling for relationship status, which has been repeatedly shown to correlate with testosterone, supporting conclusions that gender stereotypes in this case were not modulating testosterone. Still, this paradigm opens up new avenues for research on gender and socially situated biology, by attending closely to the ways that gender norms constrain behaviors that themselves modulate physiology. Our experiment provides evidence for a novel gender→testosterone pathway and points to possible mechanisms and mediation via gender-stereotyped behavior. This may be especially the case for competitions enacted in social daily life because these are the ones with high frequencies of engagement (in contrast to infrequent formalized competitions with clear win/loss outcomes, where men’s testosterone can show an increase, e.g., refs. 7 and 28. Accordingly, we designed our experiment to disentangle power from masculinity where the two are typically conflated, so that we could assess two competing mediating pathways from gender to testosterone. Gender norms influence women to perform behaviors in stereotypically less masculine ways, and men to perform them in stereotypically more masculine ways. Accordingly, men could be engaging more frequently than women in behaviors that increase testosterone. Although evidence is mixed, some forms of competition do increase testosterone in men, although these are mainly formalized ones with clear win/loss outcomes as with athletic engagements (7, 18). Our research design was able to disentangle wielding power from masculinity using trained actors, providing an innovative new paradigm. We recruited trained actors to act out firing a subordinate, a context that demonstrates one’s own status and power and involves more regular social interactions and dynamics than more formalized competitions such as athletic events. Testosterone has similar evolved functions in women’s and men’s bodies (27), but we have repeatedly found it easier to decrease testosterone in men and increase testosterone in women (3). There may be more than one pathway from gender to testosterone because gender is multifaceted and includes behavior, stereotypes, roles, identity, and so on. In addition, conceptualizations of masculinity tend to overlap with those of power and testosterone (3, 26). Also, mixed evidence suggests that "power poses" can increase testosterone (22, cf. ref. 23). For men with low blood testosterone levels and symptoms most likely caused by a low level, the benefits of hormone replacement therapy usually outweigh potential risks. Testosterone therapy may make sense for women who have low testosterone levels and symptoms that might be due to testosterone deficiency. Estrogen therapy increases sex hormone binding globulin and, like aging men, this reduces the amount of free, active testosterone in the body. The researchers found the content was closely linked to the online manosphere, a cluster of online communities that promote narrow, hyper-masculine ideals and frame men’s health, identity and success through dominance, physical strength and sexual performance. Finally, 15 min after the performance, participants provided a second saliva sample and completed the PANAS and gender self-ratings again. Although salivary assays may underestimate the actual strength of testosterone–behavior links in women (45), our within-subjects design addresses this problem (6). However, because men are encouraged to engage in more competitions and to wield power more frequently, this might paradoxically lead to dampened testosterone responses in men to individual competitions, as has been shown in other species (15). Our study used a more social interactive engagement, with the opportunity for rich social communication consistently marking power rather than merely outcome. By involving actors, we were able to maximize the strengths and rigor of a within-subjects design, whereby participants were able to perform the same scenario with direction in two genders, including one that was not normative for participants. The lack of stress axis activation means that changes in testosterone resulted from the hypothalamic–pituitary–gonadal axis and not from performance stress (androgens are also released from the adrenal gland, which releases cortisol). However, incorporating cortisol into the analyses did not change the results, and wielding power did not significantly affect cortisol. Cortisol is also sensitive to stress activation (33) in ways that might matter for acting performance in general or stressful social interactions such as the one we used. As a manipulation check, results confirmed that participants were able to act in gender-stereotypical ways.
